Archive for December, 2005

After being disappointed in the overall performance of WordPress’s efforts here, and I know they’re doing the best they can but still, but still I’m trying to run something close to a professional personal/business website and WP here has been more aggravating to use that I thought at first blush it would be…anyway…I’m taking my blog totally in-house where “I” can control things better, so please bookmark the new URL for it:

North Carolina being North Carolina of course it was almost inevitable that we’d be the circus, eerrrr, site of the nation’s 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 and last night’s dinner and floor show at Central Prison, located about ten miles or so from my house, didn’t disappoint.

I am of firm conviction but mixed mind when it comes to the death penalty as it’s done in the US.

The warrior in me cries out that in time of war that all spies caught on the battlefield and all truly treasonous traitors who sell out my, YOUR country for whatever reasons to our avowed enemies (as opposed to those who lawfully oppose and protest this or that government policy concerning said war or anything else) be excuted swiftly once caught, and I’m human enough to say that any sub-human animal that kidnaps, rapes and murders a child or commits other similar truly heinous crimes such as the cold-blooded murder of a frontline law enforcement officer should die at the hands of state legal system justic, but the way that the death penalty is used in this country, basically to kill only those too poor or too without any influence on the legal system is not only immoral and wrong but is truly a travety and afront to human dignity.

When you throw in the truly horrifying fact or at least should be reason by itself enough to immediately mandate a moratorium on enforcement of the death penalty that time and time and time and time again prosecutors/Distric Attorneys have knowingly withheld exculpatory evidence, created false evidence, coerced perjured confessions and generally done anything they could to get death penalty convictions knowing full well that the citizen charged with said capital crime was innocent, well, don’t get me started on this.

Let’s just say I have and will always say that when someone, anyone in a position of legal authority who abuses their power for whatever reasons to send any innocent person to jail let alone send them to the death chamber, then I truly believe that legal official – when caught – should lawfully receive the same punishment they callously inflicted for their own selfish gain and reasons upon that innocent person they chose to use for vendettal scapegoat, and yes, if said DA or whoever wrongly, knowingly and willfully prosecutes someone they know to be truly innocent of a captial crime and that person is eventually executed, then said District Attorney should be charge with muder since that’s what they did, cold-bloodedly murder an innocent person and then on top of it cowardly used the power of the state to do so, and then put to death themselves, truly an eye for a eye.

But until there is a complete and total transparency of the legal process of prosecuting someone for a capital crime (shoot, for all crimes), traceability of all evidence and complete accountability for all actions on both the defense as well as prosecutor’s side, remember the prosecutor has to prove the defendent guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the defense is not required to prove anything, then let us follow “The Golden Rule” and treat all our bretheren the way we would wish to be treated and end the current horrendously flawed system of occasionally putting an innocent man to death along with a whole bunch of crearly guilty ones – just to satisfy a small segment society’s need for bloodlust vengence.

The death penalty can and should be appropriate in some circumstances, but the current system is not the way to do it.

I admit, maybe a tad sheepishly, that I used to be a NetworkSolutions.com snob, much as I was Mac snob for years and years.

When the not just dominance but total monopoly that NetSol had over issuing and controlling the flow of domain name registrations and management was first broken and lower-cost and more-customer-service-friendly registrars such as GoDaddy.com popped up on the scene, I simply refused to use them and steered my clients away from them as well preferring to go with the stalwart I knew rather than the nimble ninja company (GoDaddy.com) I didn’t.

But the other day, much as that day when I finally threw up my hands and quit being in denial about Microsoft not only having won the battle but also the war and retired my old trusty friends, errrr, Macs to a yard sale, I finally said to heck with it and then TRIED to move the handful of existing domains I still had with NetSol over to GoDaddy and what happened next is prime of why Network Solutions is a dinosaur from another web era that’s hung on somehow, refusing to make major changes and actually try to be comptetive with the piranhas that have been eating their lunch as well as their flesh and refusing still to do anything other than pay the most sarcastic attempts at what they call customer service but I call pure arrogance to downright hubris.

Long story shorter, I tried to “unlock” my domain registrations at NetSol but couldn’t. This was damned curious, since I had NEVER “locked” them (added a couple of layers of safety and aggravation to them so that they couldn’t be “hijacked”) to begin with.

So, when I went to my Account Manager screen at NetSol, sure, certainly, there were complete instructions, a very nice FAQ on how to unlock them, except these instructions were complete and total bullhockey, were patently and completely a total pack of not just lies but damned lies and Network Solutions knew this!”

How did they know their instructions on how to unlock them were a bunch of damned lies? Because the very nice customer service rep, after spending over 5 minutes totally arguing with me about why I wanted to unlock them so I could move them (maybe because they’re my property and not NetSol’s, Hmmm???) and then completely harranguing me and almost, almost told me I didn’t have the right to unlock them, which apparentently I actually didn’t since it was he and he as the NetSol employee alone that had the power to unlock them, not me as THE OWNER of said domains, I assumed this whole drama took place because he was under orders to under penalty of losing his job if he didn’t, there must a wholesale flight if not mass migration from NetworkSoultions to GoDaddy and other independent registrars is all I can figure as why you’d risk totally pissing your customers off which they definitely did, piss me off royally by doing everything wrong from a customer service point of view, and since they told me in writing it’d be FIVE FULL DAYS before they’d release them, something I just shake my head over, yeah, Bozos at NetSol, that was truly the last straw since you could have released them that same day, that same moment you could have released them while your goon, errrr, customer service rep was turning the lock on them off, if you didn’t have a company policy of treating your existing customers like dirt under your feet and gauranteeing I would never recommend NetSol for anything ever again.

Pardon my venting, folks, but the nonsense I experience was and is totally UN-excusable, were the acts of desperate former monopoly trying to salvage not just their customer base but actually stay in business, something I’m wondering about now, if with this attitude of customers-as-vassals-and-or-serfs and they’re the blankety-blank (former) royalty they’re not 100% gauranteeing their own eventual extinction, their former reputation of quality and service be damned.